In the four years that have passed since Daniel Herranz presented Sentimiento, his first collection for Zurce, at Mexico Fashion Week, he has evolved his brand from mostly knitwear into a wardrobe of everyday pieces elevated by his unexpected take on fabrics, silhouettes, and proportions.
Finding a distinct identity is, of course, an integral part of building a brand, particularly in its early years. For his last three collections, Herranz has turned literary, looking to books that have left a lasting impression on him for inspiration. The first was Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen, followed by the story of Pedro Páramo and for his latest, he drew inspiration from the whimsical and trippy Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “It was the first book my grandmother gave me when I was around seven,” he said. “Revisiting the text, interpreting it in a different way, and bringing it into what we do at the brand was incredible.”
The result was a collection that could be styled to feel either elaborate or practical. Sheer pastel skirts, shirts with built-in fastenings that secured the tie in place, and sequined pieces evoked the playful spirit of La Hora del Té, the chapter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that inspired the collection’s title. Tailoring introduced a more structured, yet equally creative, dimension, with fluid pleated pants and matching jackets that played with proportions and sculpted the silhouette.
The collection was conceived in chapters, one of which set color aside to explore variations in shape and proportion rendered solely through black and white. While crochet has become considerably less prominent than it once was, it was revived here in a few charming sweaters; More compelling, however, was its subtle presence as a design code beneath a trench coat.
“We want to build a brand that feels Mexican, made for Mexico,” Herranz said. “We want to create clothes people actually wear, because at the end of the day, you can wear a jacket to work. That’s the versatility we’re looking for.” Like Lewis Carroll’s work, Mexico can be read from different perspectives, none of them uniform, all of them full of unexpected turns.
